ctness. The sense of it
is this,--

These gardens belong to the public and the owners are
requested to protect their property.

There to my mind speaks the true voice of democracy, and that
inscription afforded me the pleasantest spectacle I saw in the course of
my two years pilgrimage through the Australias.

CHAPTER XIV

Mr Rudyard Kipling and Bruggksmith--New Zealand--Its Climate
--People--Fortune--Ned's Chum--Sir George Grey.

Whilst I was in Australia I found in the pages of the _Melbourne Argus_
a very remarkable poem and an equally remarkable prose story which had
originally appeared in one of the great Anglo-Indian journals. They were
alike anonymous, but it was quite evident that they came from the same
hand. A few months later they were known to be the work of Rudyard
Kipling; and when I returned to London the new writer was at the zenith
of the literary firmament and was shining there like a comet. For the
first few years of his career he looked inexhaustible, and whilst he
was still at his most dazzling best, he produced a litde masterpiece
of roaring farce which, for sheer broad fun and high animal spirits,
surpasses anything else I know in English fiction. The story is
called _Bruggksmith_. I myself read it and still read it with intense
enjoyment, dashed with a very singular surprise, for the principal
episode in that story had actually happened to me some years before
Mr Kipling told it, and I had related it scores and scores of times in
public and in private. I have a theory about this matter which I shall
here make it my business to unfold. But I must first relate my own
adventure. It was between Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and I
was dining quite alone in the Grand Hotel at Dunedin, when a stranger
entered and took his seat beside me. I paid no heed to him at first, but
by and by he laid a hand upon my sleeve and said: "I believe that you
are Mr David Christie Murray?" I pleaded guilty and turning round to my
companion found him to be a person of a sea-faring aspect with a stubbly
beard of two or three days' growth. He was smartly attired in a suit
of blue pilot cloth with brass anchor buttons, and there was a band
of tarnished gold lace around the peaked cap which he nursed upon his
knees. His accent was of the broadest Scotch and his nationality was
unmistakably to be read in his sun-tanned, weather-beaten face. It was
pretty evident that he had been drinking, tho